Marker, ink, pencil and frottage, 30 3/8" x 42 3/8"
This drawing represents a city environment with a cast of humorously bizarre and somewhat threatening characters. According to the artist these characters represent real people in our world, some nice and some not so nice, but all hidden so you don't know them. Some creatures have claws or spikes; others display unsavory habits such as an unshaven tongue or a dripping faucet for a nose. Prominent is the highly amusing figure of a shoe wearing shoes.
Utilizing tools he found in the industrial shop where he worked at the time LaMantia selected a carpenter's pencil to create the powerful lines and large shapes of thickly applied graphite. He chose a piece of discarded wood previously used for testing drill bits to develop areas of frottage (rubbing).
Paul LaMantia is often associated with the Imagists and has works in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Collection of Jean Dubuffet, Paris, France.
-Suellen Rocca, Curator 02/12
This work is on exhbition in The Suellen Rocca Gallery.